This weekend, Chris Reyes, Tom Enright, Kevin Tracy, John O’Malley, Mike Pepplar, and I made a video game for Game Jam 6. Our time limit was 48 hours. Given the time constraint, I’m very happy with our results. You play as Zap, an electric spark whose sole goal in life is to successfully travel from a power cord to a toaster enabling toast to be created and freed from its toaster prison.

Artists today are some of the luckiest of all time. The internet has afforded artists the ability to speak directly to their audience, without the filter of an art dealer or gallery. Immediately after finishing a work I can post it online. The work will be seen by hundreds of people before it is even a day old. While there is nothing like looking at a painting in person, social networking allows artists to share exactly what they are creating while they are creating it.

I am a huge fan of what sites like Twitter, Facebook, Deviant Art, My Space, and Flickr have done for contemporary creatives. Recently, I was invited to join Dribbble. Dribbble is like Twitter, but for designers and illustrators. Updates are called “shots,” as they are small screen shots of your current work. There are a lot of basketball references (not all of which I understand). I was lucky enough to get “drafted” to Dribbble by the very visually talented David Everly. To show Dave my gratitude, I painted the following abstract portrait of Dave’s current Twitter avatar.